I have a busy year ahead of me. I am in the throes of doing the interviews for my PhD (the fun bit) and then comes the hard bit – the analysis and writing. I’m very much looking forward to it. Over the past few years of blogging here and at my personal blogsite, I [...]

This is a day that few ALP supporters could have dreamed would ever come to pass. The Liberals tearing themselves to pieces over policy. Who knew they had it in them? Of course, there were some great stoushes over leadership and pre-selections back in the 1980s, but nothing on this scale. Back then, the ‘wets’, [...]

In the first decade after Federation, the conservative forces (Deakin’s protectionists and Reid’s free traders) opted for fusion in the face of the growing electoral and parliamentary strength of the Labor party. The formation of the Country Party in 1922 introduced a clear rural interest, and took votes from the ALP and bolstered the conservative [...]

Today’s media coverage is rightly hostile about the Crawford report, commissioned and welcomed by the Rudd Government, which recommends that Australia abandon its Olympic traditions and ambitions and accept a more realistic target. So much for excellence. The report recommends that additional government funding go to community sport (eg our many footy codes) rather than [...]

This is the text of a piece I wrote for ABC Unleashed last year: On Wednesday last week, during ceremonies to mark the nation’s apology, Bonney Djuric gave Prime Minister Rudd a letter seeking his support for a living memorial to the Forgotten Australians and the Stolen Generations in Sydney’s western suburbs, on a site [...]

Now the attention of Australian policy-makers is turning to maximising prosperity, understood as GDP growth, over the next few years. The Australian’s Michael Stutchbury says this will require ‘tough-love’ policies. Usually, this is code for giving carrots to the rich and sticks to the poor. Tough for the bottom of society, great for the top, [...]

Rudd is a control freak. His government is run along command and control lines (read Cameron Stewart’s interesting piece in last Saturday’s Australian magazine). His media strategy is a campaign strategy. Win the day, stay in front. Make your opponent the issue. Control the message. Make no mistakes. This is the goldfish in a bowl [...]

We’re seeing more articles like this one in the Times: Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, [...]

It’s easy to take the piss out of journalists, and to blame the media for everything. Journalists often over-estimate how much they know, and exaggerate their own importance. But they’re not alone in having those shortcomings. Where you sit is where you stand. And people in different sectors of our complex democracy are quick to [...]